Building a Second-Half Team

Securing Cultural Expertise for the Battlespace

Editorial Abstract: This article contends that
force development in the US Air Force is undermined by lackluster
feedback at the tactical level. The authors outline the current use
of feedback in the service, review factors related to creating
effective developmental feedback at the tactical level, and comment
on current initiatives designed to improve feedback and force
development within the Air Force.

Americans love football.
Sports talk shows earn high ratings, and numbers of fans call in to forecast and
vent about their favorite team’s recent and future performances. The periodic
spectacle of two relatively similar teams—their actions governed by a well-known
rule book, meeting within visible boundaries to smash helmets and maneuver
toward the end zones—has become part of our national identity.

Perhaps this popular sport has colored the American psyche’s grasp on war.
For instance, a portion of our population still waxes nostalgic for the Cold
War. Back then, everyone chose between two favorite “teams,” each of
which—though endowed with different strengths and weaknesses—brought similar
capabilities to the global playing field. Each side made a huge effort to peek
into the enemy’s playbook to ascertain his capabilities—President Eisenhower,
for instance, created a serious diplomatic donnybrook by attempting to find out
via the U-2 the number of bombers the Soviets could bring to the game. One can
understand our national-security apparatus’s assumption of success in this
endeavor and the big resources committed to it. After all, in 1959 we had one
principal enemy with one Big Red playbook, so learning its contents became a
high priority.

Fortunately, the two teams never crossed the Fulda Gap line of scrimmage; nor
did Coaches Khrushchev and Kennedy take their teams to the Cuba Bowl in 1963.
Now, however, the United States has no near-peer competitor and needs to adapt
its team accordingly. Each of the numerous potential opponents in the world
today uses a different playbook. Analysts can no longer watch the postgame show
to prepare for future competitions. Briefing coaches on mission, enemy, terrain,
time, and available troops is no longer sufficient. Each enemy will use a
playbook tailored to local conditions as well—those of the indigenous culture.
Combatant commanders will need advisors, warriors, practitioners, theorists, and
strategists educated in human terrain to help them best utilize their people and
equipment before, during, and after hostilities. This array of professionals
will also hone nonkinetic tools like public affairs (PA), civil affairs (CA),
and psychological operations (PSYOP). These are important activities, especially
for the postconflict phase of military operations—a phase inherently asymmetric
and increasingly conducted in cities. The end of the Cold War, therefore, does
not demand a new metaphor but a modification of our previous paradigm, and the
Department of Defense (DOD) will need a bench crowded with on-call regional
expertise to meet this demand.

Simply put, the enemy is going urban and asymmetric. The Russian approach to
Grozny—pulling forces back beyond rocket-propelled-grenade range from city
limits and flattening the population center with shells and bombs—will not work
in Fallujah. The United States needs nonkinetic, “softer” solutions like PA, CA,
and PSYOP to meet its national-security objectives in future conflicts. We can
enable and maximize these activities by means of cultural expertise, a craft
worthy of the DOD’s investment and cultivation.

Heading into the Stands:
A Useful Analogy for Counterinsurgency

As Maj Raymond Finch describes in his article on the Chechen guerrilla Shamil
Basayev, the superpowers are still ready to take the field and prosecute
conventional force-on-force conflict. The opposition, however, has discarded the
Cold War rule book as nation-states erode and “away games” occur more frequently
in venues like Chechnya and Somalia, where the opposition’s athletes “have moved
up into the stands, wreaking all sorts of havoc.” Finch envisions the US
military of the future maintaining its skills on the field but warns against
sitting idle there in anticipation of the ideal opponent while the situation in
the bleachers deteriorates.1

Thomas Barnett notes the resistance to pulling our military capability away
from its traditional conventional approach:
Our continued focus on the Big One left us with a force that can topple rogue
regimes at will, without the assistance of allies, but cannot manage all the
lesser includeds that arise in the aftermath—even with the help of our closest
allies. In effect, we spent the 1990s buying one sort of military, only to
realize after 9/11 that we needed another. . . . America lacked the vision—and
the visionaries—to define the 1990s as anything beyond a mere addendum to the
Cold War.2
This line of reasoning raises a question: if not “the Big One,” which war should
American forces prepare to fight?
Future enemies probably won’t be as militarily inept as Saddam Hussein, who
twice went to war with the United States in 12 years, employing exactly the type
of force that American commanders expected to fight in Central Europe. Our
leadership must embrace the fact that future adversaries will not fight in open
terrain, where US air supremacy and expertise with precision-guided munitions
will threaten each operational and tactical maneuver. More likely, future
adversaries will fight asymmetric warfare in cities.

As Prof. Steven Metz of the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute
writes, this asymmetry will emerge in four ways on the future battlefield:

1. The enemy’s method will be unconventional; he will not fight like American
conventional forces do.2. His time perspective will differ—he will deny US decision makers the quick
success for which the American electorate yearns in war.3. The enemy’s “cells, bands, and networks” will not be a hierarchical
organization.4. Finally, an enemy’s ethical asymmetry will be noticeable; he will fight in
ways the US soldier finds abhorrent, outside the Geneva convention.3

Hence, the future enemy will not fit well into the parameters of our
traditional adversary. If our commanders anticipate a tank battle, for example,
the enemy may sow improvised explosive devices (IED) along our route of advance;
he will not utilize tanks to assail us. He will be more patient in meeting his
goals—like the Vietcong, he will not have to win the battle as long as he
doesn’t lose the fight. For intelligence analysts, compiling orders of battle
will prove difficult because the enemy’s units won’t be as clearly delineated as
our own. Lastly, those amorphous units will fight dirty to wear down our
resolve.

The US military’s current expeditionary mind-set makes ports and airfields a
priority for delivering and sustaining our forces. The fact that most of these
facilities are near major cities is significant since the latter offer several
advantages to the asymmetric warrior. First, the reconnaissance-strike cycle
that enables us to take down conventional forces so spectacularly works best in
open terrain—like that in Mesopotamia. Dense clusters of buildings erode
battlefield communications (ground-to-ground, ground-to-air, and air-to-ground)
and the effectiveness of munitions. Second, lobbing munitions into a densely
populated area significantly raises the chance of killing noncombatants. As the
Russians discovered in Chechnya, in the age of the digital camera and global
connectivity of the Internet, this sort of indiscriminate destruction weakens
one’s case for armed intervention.

The population density of the modern city brings other issues to the
combatant commander. As Lester Grau and Jacob Kipp describe this situation,
operational commanders need to prepare for the needs of a city’s civilian
population. If noncombatants can’t get potable water, an epidemic is likely, and
starving, besieged civilians in the modern age will probably end up in front of
a camera. American military leaders, therefore, cannot focus solely on the
military task of taking down the city. Unlike Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus or
Gen Vasily Chuikov at Stalingrad, today’s combatant commander “does not have the
luxury of claiming that military necessity precludes consideration of civilians’
survival. He must prepare to restore or provide food, water, health care, public
health services, and public safety.”4

In fact, commanders of occupation forces are legally bound to protect and
provide for the civilians under their control—in effect to become the mayors of
cities in which they are tasked to operate.5 Indigenous providers of essentials,
however, can offer much more than the necessities. Grau and Kipp cite
neighborhood subject-matter experts as the best sources of intelligence in urban
combat. Both the limitations to the electronic spectrum in modern cities and the
shortage of municipal maps with a scale of 1:12,500 for these areas have
increased the value of harnessing “the local police force, city engineers,
utility workers, hospital workers and shopkeepers” to offset the enemy’s
human-intelligence advantages.6 In urban warfare, the enemy will often know the
local subways and sewers. US commanders will also need this information as well
as the locations of electric, gas, fiber-optic, and drainage conduits necessary
to provide the aforementioned essentials to populations. A friendly relationship
with public-service providers is thus a major benefit in winning the peace.

To return to the analogy, when the US team moves into the stands to confront
the opposition’s mischief, it would be wise to get help from the stadium’s
custodians and concessionaires. Their routine tasks of maintaining and marketing
make them experts in negotiating key terrain and identifying anomalies. Such
intelligence is critical in conducting counterinsurgencies; understanding both
the opposing team and the spectators is its precursor.

Handling Insurgents:
Putting Aside Some Plowshares

What is the role of human terrain in all this? The most successful asymmetric
warfare strategy during the Cold War—Mao Tse-tung’s “People’s War”—called for a
team of revolutionary experts to agitate a populace via nationalism and local
grievances. Establishing this underground political organization paved the way
for organizing guerrilla warfare. “The people” were integral to the insurgents’
aims—its members actively picked up rifles and assailed government forces or
simply provided safe haven and logistical support to guerrillas. The well-known
analogy of insurgent fish swimming through the sea of the populace propagated
with each insurgent success. Attaining such results and maintaining popular
support against an arrogant, clueless government proved easy in this paradigm,
in which “psychological operations and political mobilization paralleled
military actions. In fact, violence was viewed as ‘armed propaganda’ designed
for maximum psychological effect, such as demonstrating the weakness or
incompetence of the regime or provoking it into excessive reactions, which
eroded its support.”7 The most effective efforts to liquidate insurgents in this
historical paradigm also alienated the public, both inside and outside the area
of conflict. Often, the populace would thus shift its support from government
forces to the opposition.

This ugly cycle of “armed propaganda” and “excessive reactions” remains
pertinent. Breaking it demands finesse, flexibility, and intense familiarity
with local conditions and populations: “In counterinsurgency campaigns,
protection of civilians was (sometimes) emphasized, not so much as an end in
itself but in order to undercut the insurgents’ infrastructure and because the
civilian population was an important source of intelligence. In other words,
protection and control of the population was a means to an end, which was
defeating the insurgents” (emphasis added).8

As has recently become evident in Iraq, counterinsurgencies are political
fights because both insurgent and counterinsurgent need the support of the
population. According to Col John Jogerst, commandant of the USAF Special
Operations School, “insurgencies are pure politics at the most basic level. It’s
more like an election campaign to garner votes, albeit a no-holds-barred
campaign on the south side of Chicago in the 1920s, than a war.”9

Human Terrain:
The Best Collectors Won’t
Be Overhead

We must still send our forces into combat with the tangibles (i.e., the best
weaponry and equipment we can procure), but in these sorts of engagements,
intangibles are just as important. Although the need for clearly delineated and
articulated strategic goals lies outside the scope of this article, one
intangible remains paramount to victory in future wars—understanding of regional
culture. Thomas Hammes observes that understanding the political terrain is an
essential facet of modern warfare: “This requires a deep understanding of the
culture, history, and current political structure of the area. Because modern
conflicts are rarely limited to a single country, this understanding must extend
to the region as a whole.”10

In his recent assessment of lessons learned in modern counterinsurgencies,
Col Joseph Celeski, USA, retired, a former commander of the Combined Joint
Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan, agrees that commanders going into
the stands must have the best possible analysis of the demographics there:
Key to the analysis must include a cultural “assessment,” even prior to entering
the area of operations, to understand the forces at play concerning ethnicity,
language (to include dialects), religion, and nationalism (or ideology). This
assessment must take into account the social influence networks which buttress
the society—political, academic, criminal, business, technology, etc. The data
provides a start point for the links and nodes sought for in the target analysis
of human terrain systems (human nodes, influence links, nexus areas, etc.).11

Hence, many recent publications consider it essential that we understand this
regional, human terrain. How can US commanders attain such knowledge?Superior technology has allowed the American military to master the conventional
fight. Unfortunately, it has also led to the gloomy description of “a first-half
team playing in a league that keeps score through the end of the game.”12
Certainly, this superior technology will have its place in the last two
quarters—but only as an enabler for a more suitable human-collection platform:

It is through good knowledge of local practices that it is possible to identify
insurgents or those who assist them. There needs to be an ongoing process of
consultation and dialogue with people on the ground for early warning,
prevention, learning, and feedback during deployment and for the measures needed
to ensure redundancy of missions. Human intelligence . . . based on engagement
with local people can be supplemented by other intelligence methods (technology
and espionage) but should increasingly be considered the centerpiece of
intelligence.13One can infer that in cities, where populations are dense and the fight,
therefore, is more political, the best collectors exist at ground level and
don’t require batteries.

Iraq: We’re beyond
the Second Quarter

America can use its technological superiority to collect amazing information
that enables “fewer war fighters to levy more damage at a longer distance.”14
Again, however, the second half of the game is not so much about kinetic
solutions. In a recent RAND report, Bruce ­Pirnie and others posit that modern
air forces can engage ground targets more effectively and efficiently than ever.
They also argue that—regardless of the monumental success in Kosovo—ground power
remains critical to the modern fight because it necessitates contact with the
locals. Airpower will never be the preferred method for such tasks as finding
and engaging guerrillas, policing the area, collecting human intelligence, and
constructing buildings. These endeavors are important to winning the peace in an
urban environment because “activities requiring human contact tend to be most
critical in counterinsurgency, stabilization, peacekeeping, ‘nation building,’
and related military operations, missions that have become increasingly
important in U.S. strategy since 1989 and that are likely to predominate for the
foreseeable future.”15

If US forces want to lob something heavy downrange at this point in the
competition, it should be a message rather than a munition. At every step of the
process—composition, delivery, and assessment—commanders from the president down
will need regional expertise and superb intelligence to assist in this endeavor.
As the British found in their counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Borneo during
the 1960s, the best intelligence comes from locals, who will provide it only
when the counter­insurgent guarantees them security from reprisals and a stake
in the counterinsurgency’s success.16 In Iraq, it is essential that coalition
forces find a way to do this as well, but they can accomplish only a small piece
of it from air and space. Most of the weight rests on the shoulders of the
on-scene (ground) commanders in places like Tal Afar and Fallujah.

According to military-affairs author Victor O’Reilly, the hazards of
responding to an insurgency amongst a dense population were certainly a factor
when the conventional phase of the war in Iraq wound down:
It is my belief that the insurgency was substantially created by the tactics
used by the occupying force, who were initially the saviors, in their search for
Saddam Hussein. Ambitious generals, who should have known better, created a very
aggressive do-what-is-necessary culture. Frustrated troops, with no familiarity
with the language or culture naturally make mistakes. And in a tribal society if
you shoot one person it spreads right through the system. (emphasis added)
Furthermore, he notes, the search for weapons of mass destruction served to
embitter the locals. The lack of interpreters forced soldiers to communicate
with sign language, a state of affairs hardly conducive to winning hearts and
minds. “The result,” O’Reilly posits, “was that American troops were blind and
deaf to much of what was going on around them, and the Iraqis were often
terrified.”17

The conflict in Iraq, however, is evolving. Current-affairs commentator
Robert Bryce points out an alarming trend. In World War II, mines or booby traps
accounted for 3 percent of US combat deaths; the figure rose to 4 percent in
Korea and 9 in Vietnam. Notably, though, “from June to November of 2005, [IEDs]
were responsible for 65% of combat deaths and roughly half of all nonfatal
injuries.” Bryce concludes that this lack of direct engagement cedes the
tactical advantage to insurgents, citing an interview with military theorist
William Lind to support a particularly somber assessment for American soldiers
in Iraq: “Our whole military is based on the idea of overwhelming firepower put
on targets, but that doesn’t work in this type of conflict. We are fighting an
enemy that has made himself untargetable. . . . Therefore, insurgents can
continue fighting the American military in Iraq indefinitely—regardless of how
many US troops are deployed or how quickly they are massed.”18 Given the
approximate figure of $3.5 billion that the DOD spent in 2006 on counter-IED
initiatives and recent press reports that the Army has overextended itself due
to frequent rotations to Southwest Asia, one wonders how to address the fluid
situation in Iraq.19
Barnett provides a litmus test for US military success in modern expeditionary
warfare: “Did we end up improving local security sufficiently to trigger an
influx of global connectivity? Increasingly, our military interventions will be
judged by the connectivity they leave behind, not the smoking holes.”20 Should
the United States employ this metric for success, one would expect a search
through the national-security quiver for something less lethal, kinetic, and
technical than means used against previous asymmetric foes. As historian Michael
Howard remarks in a recent article, “The light provided by our knowledge of
technological capabilities and our capacity for sophisticated strategic analysis
is so dazzling as to be almost hypnotic; but it is in those shadowy regions of
human understanding based on our knowledge of social development, cultural
diversity and patterns of behaviour that we have to look for the answers.”21

The United States holds a superlative edge in air superiority, medical
evacuation and treatment, logistics, and robust fire support—all essential
facets. We can also put multiple platforms over the battlefield to monitor both
the fight and many variables invisible to ground commanders. Each of these
strengths remains essential even if enemy players drop their uniforms and head
into the bleachers; this is certainly the case in Iraq, where IEDs represent a
concrete symptom of this development. In order to win such small fights,
however, the US team must communicate with concessionaires and custodial staff
to keep feeding the spectators and to gain familiarity with the stadium.
Maintaining communication with the fans themselves can yield valuable
intelligence when something unexpected pops up in the crowd.

Consider, for instance, the aforementioned IEDs. In No True Glory: A
Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, Bing West describes not only the
combat learning curve, but also a specific failure that could have been avoided
had we established a working dialogue with the city dwellers. He reveals that
soldiers of the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division quickly grew suspicious of their
surroundings: dead dogs, barrels lying at odd angles, or cardboard boxes
remaining stationary during high winds could be booby-trapped. Daily patrols,
one could surmise, were essential to building this situational awareness. “In
mid-July [2003], though, one soldier was killed and three wounded when an
artillery shell detonated as a convoy drove through western Fallujah. Dozens of
­local residents had driven around the device, but no one had warned the
Americans.”22

It takes two entities to conduct a dialogue; we need to cultivate finesse in
order to prevent American players from knocking people over and stepping on toes
in their drive toward mission accomplishment. An active campaign to explain the
presence of American might and to display interest in the population’s
well-being could gain at least passive support from spectators and could induce
local inhabitants to surreptitiously point out hazards to US soldiers.

Possible Solutions

The means to facilitate this dialogue already reside within the
aforementioned quiver, and the DOD has ready access to it. First, as defined by
Joint Publication (JP) 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and
Associated Terms, 12 April 2001 (as amended through 14 April 2006), public
affairs is “public information, command information, and community relations
activities directed toward both the external and internal publics with interest
in the Department of Defense.” Simply put, US forces can communicate their
intents and activities via this medium. The need for PA is highlighted in the
9/11 Commission Report, wherein Richard Holbrooke asks, “ ‘How can a man in a
cave outcommunicate the world’s leading communications society?’ ” and Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage states that “Americans have been ‘exporting
our fears and our anger,’ not our vision of opportunity and hope.”23 PA may not
invent US vision and goals, but when it comes to the struggle to drown out
radical anti-US rhetoric, it certainly has a critical role to play in
communicating them to the affected parties.

Second, according to JP 1-02, civil affairs activities “(1) enhance the
relationship between military forces and civil authorities in areas where
military forces are present; and (2) involve application of civil affairs
functional specialty skills, in areas normally the responsibility of civil
government, to enhance conduct of civil-military operations.” Thomas Henriksen
mentions that such activities include “refurbishing schools, building roads,
digging wells, and treating the sick.”24 In sum, CA minimizes the disruption of
noncombatants’ lives in the war zone, making each of them a stakeholder in the
operation. If, for instance, a municipality is without potable water for months
and US forces provide a permanent waterworks, then the head of every affected
household has an interest in keeping insurgents far away from the town.

Prof. Dan Moran of the Naval Postgraduate School writes that Mao’s soldiers
helped harvest crops, deterred crime, taught citizens to read, and made civil
reconstruction a priority while fighting Japanese and Nationalist forces. These
activities “allowed the revolutionary warrior to occupy the political and
psychological void his own actions were intended to create.” By contrast, he
notes, fighting against insurgencies demands a deployable instrument to work
shoulder-to-shoulder with local populations and provide better “grassroots
social action” than the insurgents.25 The United States recognized the need to
fill this void by creating CA units during World War II, so the pertinent
apparatus has existed for six decades.

JP 1-02 defines a third nonkinetic tool, psycho­logical operations, as
“planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign
audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and
ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and
individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce
foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.” As
highlighted previously, each of these concepts—PA, CA, and PSYOP—is important to
commanders fighting in cities and against asymmetric foes.

Cultural information, buttressed by cultural intelligence, serves as the
foundation of effective PA, CA, and PSYOP. Cultural preparation of the
battlefield, therefore, is paramount. In their article “Refocusing
Intelligence,” Keith Masback and Sean Tytler envision intelligence providing
leadership—the “consumer”—not only with facts, but also the context of those
facts. Thus consumers see battlefield causes as well as effects, a perspective
that could augment their effectiveness in unconventional military actions. Where
can the US military acquire this level of analysis?
Education that stresses investigative skills, tests assumptions, and informs our
analysts with a complete range of cultural, economic, and social understanding
will best position them to overcome biases, and strengthen their argument as
they seek to mitigate the biases of their customers. A critical enabler to
mitigating analyst and user bias is cultural awareness. Operators and decision
makers must understand our adversaries—their biases, cultural beliefs, and image
of the United States—in order to truly understand their motivations and
intentions.26

Currently, three sources can provide this perspective to our commanders.
First, as Barnett points out, manpower is moving from the “Gap,” where American
forces will increasingly deploy to export security, to the industrialized and
globalized “Core”: “They are coming, [and] our only choice is how we welcome
them” (emphasis in original).27 Anyone who has spent time in a US military
organization has met a service member who has earned his US citizenship via
service in that organization. Each of these individuals, beyond his or her
military specialty, can provide area expertise to US commanders. A concerted
effort to locate these people and attach them to units deploying into their
areas of origin could yield dividends—ask any commander who has dealt with a
locally contracted interpreter in a combat zone. Certain advantages accrue by
having someone in the US military hierarchy—in or out of uniform—available to
commanders to take the pulse of local populations or enable negotiations with
them.

Second, at the staff level, regional partners are very important. Beyond the
obvious blood-and-treasure burdens shared by coalition partners, regional
expertise could prove vital not only to smashing conventional forces, but also
to securing the support of those the coalition wishes to liberate in the
process. If, for example, a commander from Minnesota wanted to take down
Florida, he would be wise to look for common interests with Mississippi,
Georgia, and Alabama. Liaison officers from those states could advise the
commander’s staff on a wide range of issues should common interests emerge.
Although some people may prefer a unilateral approach, imagine how the
amphibious assault on Hitler’s Fortress Europe would have developed without
assistance from the British—or the French. For a more recent example, one need
only look to the essential support provided by Kurdish peshmerga militias (with
10th Special Forces Group advisors) to the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the first
days of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Third and most desirable, especially from the security standpoint, is the
foreign area officer (FAO) program. In April 2005, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz signed Department of Defense Directive (DODD) 1315.17, Military
Department Foreign Area Officer (FAO) Programs, tasking the military departments
to “deliberately develop a corps of FAOs, who shall be commissioned officers
with a broad range of military skills and experiences; have knowledge of
political-military affairs; have familiarity with the political, cultural,
sociological, economic, and geographic factors of the countries and regions in
which they are stationed; and have professional proficiency in one or more of
the dominant languages in their regions of expertise.” The directive calls on
the heads of DOD components to cultivate a stable of on-call regional experts
with a principal military specialty, a graduate degree, duty experience in the
regional area, and professional-level foreign-language skills. To make this
proposal marketable, FAOs will receive opportunity “for promotion into the
General/Flag Officer ranks” and periodic “language [as well as] regional
expertise sustainment and refresher training.”28 Recognizing the importance of
this asset, the DOD is providing high-visibility billets and maintaining needed
expertise for the program.

Conclusion

As Sean Edwards forecasts in his RAND study Mars Unmasked: The Changing Face
of Urban Operations, asymmetry and urban warfare will probably marry up against
US forces in future conflict. In this scenario, Edwards also posits that the
American public will expect war with few casualties, that both physical
limitations and those imposed by the rules of engagement will favor the other
side, and that infantry-on-infantry clashes will degrade US advantages in heavy
weaponry: “When civilians are present in large numbers, their support may be the
center of gravity, especially in insurgencies. Noncombatants can conceal the
enemy, provide intelligence, and take an active role in the fighting” (emphasis
added).29 The physical urban environment with its inherent restrictions—“density
of structures, the teeming population, the complexity of terrain, the
multiplicity of channels for communication, the voluminous background ‘noise,’
the prodigious quantity and heterogeneity of resources”—provides a rich human
terrain as well.30 The DOD—as validated by DODD 1315.17—has realized the
importance of cultivating subject-matter experts to help prepare that human
terrain.

The US team has a great record on the gridiron, but its efforts to move with
finesse among the people and protect them in the stands are spotty. Similarly,
America enjoys superb technology, but that advantage won’t be enough to support
its teams when they leave the field of conventional play. The added emphasis and
resources for area expertise enable commanders and statesmen—coaches,
quarterbacks, and managers—to better equip, train, and lead our players to
victory in the stands as well. The American citizenry—which includes the team’s
players, fans, and owners—will witness returns on the investment.

23. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11
Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
upon the United States (Washington, DC: The Commission, 2004), 377,
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf.

Capt Scott E. McIntosh (MA, Naval Postgraduate School) is director of the
South Central Asia Orientation Course at the USAF Special Operations School, Hurlburt Field, Florida. He previously served at McConnell AFB, Kansas,
providing tactical and strategic intelligence support to the base’s KC-135
mission and supporting combat aircrews in Operations Northern Watch, Southern
Watch, and Allied Force. He then provided intelligence support to the 3rd
Armored Corps’ air liaison officer at Fort Hood, Texas, and deployed to the air
support operations center for Combined Joint Task Forces Mountain and 180 to
enable close air support for Operation Enduring Freedom. A Eurasian affairs
specialist, he has studied at the Russian Government Language Institute at St.
Petersburg, Russia; Ivan Franko University at L’viv, Ukraine; and the US Army’s
Foreign Language Training Center–Europe at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.
Captain McIntosh is a distinguished graduate of both the Naval Postgraduate
School and Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the
author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air
University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government,
Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University